All posts filed under: Faculty Scholarship

Faculty in the Media

In the wake of a leaked Supreme Court draft opinion indicating that the historic Roe v. Wade ruling could be overturned, Temple Law faculty and staff lend their expertise to national media conversations surrounding this unprecedented development. Interim Dean Rachel Rebouché | Rolling Stone | If the leaked opinion overturning Roe becomes law, it “will have bent the moral arc of the universe backward,” writes interim Dean Rachel Rebouché and co-authors David S. Cohen and Greer Donley in Rolling Stone. Click to read. Interim Dean Rachel Rebouché | Bloomberg Law | Justice Alito’s draft opinion in Dobbs would subject laws regulating abortion to rational basis review. Interim Dean Rachel Rebouché explains what that means and how it might apply. Click to read. Interim Dean Rachel Rebouché | Washington Examiner | Returning abortion regulation to the states will invite laws that disrupt longstanding interstate cooperation, says interim Dean Rachel Rebouché. Click to read. Professor Craig Green | The Philadelphia Inquirer | Justice Alito’s draft opinion in Dobbs may have roots in his very first opinion, a …

Human Rights Protections Through International Criminal Law

One of the tools in the toolkit of human rights protection is international criminal law. However, application of this body of law is generally limited to the most serious human rights violations: atrocity crimes. In her recent book, Shocking the Conscience of Humanity: Gravity and the Legitimacy of International Criminal Law, Professor deGuzman examines what it means for crimes to be so grave that they concern all of humanity. She shows that the concept of gravity remains highly undertheorized, and uncovers the consequences for the regime’s legitimacy of its heavy reliance on this poorly understood idea. She argues that gravity’s ambiguity may at times enable a thin consensus to emerge around decisions, such as the creation of an institution or the definition of a crime, but that, increasingly, it undermines efforts to build a strong and resilient global justice community. Having elucidated the consequences of the regime’s reliance on the ambiguous idea of gravity, Professor deGuzman suggests how gravity could be reconceptualized to take account of global values and goals in the various decision-making contexts …

Temple Law Faculty Reacts to the Trump v. Mazars USA and Trump v. Vance Decisions

On July 9, 2020, Chief Justice John Roberts delivered a 7-2 opinion in Trump v. Mazars USA, refusing to enforce congressional subpoenas that sought President Trump’s tax returns and other financial records about himself, his children, and affiliated businesses. On July 9, 2020, Chief Justice John Roberts delivered a 7-2 opinion in Trump v. Vance, allowing state prosecutors to subpoena financial records concerning President Trump and his businesses. Craig Green Professor of Law Trump v. Mazars USA: Just months before the presidential election, the Supreme Court declined to enforce subpoenas that could have publicly revealed President Trump’s tax returns and financial conduct. Congressional committees demanded various financial records using their “legislative power,” seeking to investigate the need for possible statutory reform about corruption, terrorism, money laundering, or election interference. One committee also claimed oversight power to investigate executive misconduct. Mazars is the first time that any Supreme Court examined a congressional subpoena for a President’s personal information. The majority created a new “balanced approach” that tried to respect the long history of congressional subpoenas without …

A Day at the High Court of Uganda

For most of this program, I am the sole lecturer, and our days are taken up with typical Trial Advocacy coursework – directs and crosses; openings and closings; basic trial skills; depositions and mediation.  This past Thursday morning, however, the program brought in a guest speaker to speak about technological developments related to African courts.  While I’m sure I could have learned a great deal from the speaker, I used this as an opportunity to sneak off to the Ugandan High Court. The High Court building is surrounded by a high, guarded gate and barbed wire, but is open to the public nonetheless.  The High Court serves as the trial court level for significant criminal cases in Kampala, the Ugandan capital.  Lesser criminal offences start off in magistrate courts elsewhere.  I am told the High Court hears appeals as well. Still, given that the population of Kampala is a little larger than Philadelphia, the building struck me as small.  As near as I could find, there were only 6 courtrooms, and only one of them …

LRW Faculty Summer Update: Legal Writing Institute Conference

This summer, Professors Carpenter, DeJarnatt, Margolis, Murray, Stanchi, and Tavares attended the 18th Biennial Conference of the Legal Writing Institute in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Professor Kristen Murray shares a short summary of how she and the Temple Law Legal Research and Writing faculty are involved in the Legal Writing Institute. For news from our Legal Research and Writing Faculty, follow @TempleLawLRW.

Creating American Land: A Territorial History From the Albany Plan to the U.S. Constitution

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE FACULTY IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY RECOMMENDED FOR ACCEPTANCE BY THE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY Adviser: Hendrik Hartog September 2018 “The rulers of Great Britain have . . . amused the people with the imagination that they possessed a great empire on the west side of the Atlantic. This empire, however, has hitherto existed in imagination only. It has hitherto been, not an empire, but the project of an empire.” Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations 1 “A nation may be said to consist of its territory, its people, and its laws. . . . That portion of the earth’s surface which is owned and inhabited by the people of the United States is well adapted to be the home of one national family, and it is not well adapted for two or more.” Abraham Lincoln, Annual Message to Congress 2 “I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom cave to now. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large, and without mercy.” …

Classroom Seats

Charting School Discipline

Exclusionary school discipline can steer students away from educational opportunities and towards the juvenile and criminal justice systems. As many public school systems have turned to exclusionary school discipline practices over the past two decades, they have also increasingly adopted charter schools as alternatives to traditional public schools. This research is examines the student codes of conduct for the charter schools in the School District of Philadelphia to consider the role of their disciplinary practices and the potential effects on charter students. We analyzed every disciplinary code provided to the Philadelphia School District by charter schools within Philadelphia during the 2014-2015 school year. Our goal was to examine the provisions relating to detention, suspension, and expulsion, along with other disciplinary responses, to determine what conduct can result in disciplinary consequences, what responses are available for various types of misbehavior, and whether the code language is clear or ambiguous or even accessible to students or potential students and their parents or caregivers. We conclude that too many of the codes are not well drafted, and too …

Irresolute Testators, Clear and Convincing Wills Law

Controversial recent wills law reforms, embodied in new provisions of both the Uniform Probate Code and the Restatement of Property, excuse so-called “harmless errors” in will execution and permit judicial correction of erroneous terms in a will or trust. Both reforms pose evidentiary dangers, as proof of the error must come from outside the attested instrument and will be offered after the testator’s death. To respond to this concern, both the error and the testator’s true intent must be established by “clear and convincing” evidence. This article is the first to examine how courts have applied the clear and convincing evidence standard to these important reforms of wills law. In practice, the clear and convincing evidence standard provides less evidentiary protection than its proponents expected. More importantly, judicial struggles with the clear and convincing evidence standard expose a deep fissure in the very concept of testamentary freedom. The reforms assume — as does the Wills Act itself — a fully-formed, fixed set of choices that the testator has sought to express in his will, choices …

Passports

U.S. Immigration Policy And President Obama’s Executive Order For Deferred Action

Both my parents were immigrants. I grew up in a working class suburb of Detroit where every family seemed to include at least one parent or grandparent who was an immigrant, from places all over the world including Mexico, Syria, and Iraq. So of course I admire and respect immigrants, as we all should, because every American is either an immigrant or the descendent of ancestors who came here from somewhere else. And we are told that even includes Native Americans. Whether we should admire and respect immigrants is not what the immigration controversy is really about. Given that we should admire and respect immigrants, the question at the heart of the controversy is, how many should we take? And specifically, should we accept everyone in the world who wants to come to the United States to live and work? Or alternatively, should we try to enforce a numerical limit on how many immigrants we accept every year? That is a binary choice, either no limits, or an enforced limit. And it is a hard choice, …

Temple-Law-Library

Mind the Gap

We are in the midst of a major paradigm shift in legal research—both how it is done and how it should be taught. For generations of lawyers, the process of legal research remained static, rooted in a bibliographic approach that reflected the print publication of legal materials. However, as legal sources have become digitized and migrated online, it is now impossible to talk about legal research from a purely bibliographic perspective. The organization of legal materials in digital databases is getting further and further away from the world of books it once replicated. The search box has replaced most print finding tools for legal research, and lawyers conduct most of their research electronically. Today, it would be irresponsible to teach legal research without a focus on electronic research, and many have abandoned teaching book research at all. In recent years, legal writing professors and law librarians have given much scholarly attention to questions of pedagogy and training in a world of online legal research. One question that poses a serious and ongoing challenge is that …